Tag: attentiveness

The Attention Gym II: Stretching to Listen

This post discusses enhancing students’ listening abilities through class discussions, emphasizing the contrast between dialogue and conversations that function more as disconnected monologues. It advocates for viewing the classroom as an “attention gym” to strengthen active listening skills, essential for vocational discernment. The text also highlights practices to promote a culture of attentive listening among students.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

When I talk with students about the purposes of class discussion, I often show them the dinner scene from my favorite Sandra Bullock film, While You Were Sleeping. I ask them to describe what they observe about the quality of the conversation happening around the dinner table, and especially to note who seems to be listening. This scene helps us distinguish between dialogue, a method of building on each other’s ideas, and conversation that proceeds more like a set of disconnected monologues (however humorous).

Students often zero in on a key difference between the two. They note that in a dialogue, participants actively listen to understand each other. In the other kind of discussion, people listen for a break in the conversation to make space for their own voice.

It is easy to make the case to students that listening is hard, and as a culture, we are not very good at it. It is harder to explain how we can get better at it. Naming the classroom an attention gym—as I described in my first post in this series—provides the framework to highlight attention as a key resource in becoming a better listener. Class discussions then become the training ground for workouts in listening.

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The Attention Gym I: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom

This post discusses the importance of learning how to pay attention for undergraduate students, highlighting its decline in today’s digital age. It emphasizes fostering students’ attentiveness through classroom practices, framing the learning environment as an “attention gym” or a workout for the mind. Through various exercises, assignments, and reflections educators can help students reclaim focus and develop essential skills for vocational discernment.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

Fred Rogers

In a 2022 Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, Adelia Moore recounts her experience in the 1970s as a one-time guest on an episode of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and her subsequent friendship with him. In addition to his “gentleness, kindness, and empathy,” she describes the most magnetic and distinctive part of Mr. Rogers’ persona as his attentiveness, claiming that the character trait that made him such a powerful figure was “his capacity to pay attention.” This capacity, she laments, has become increasingly rare in today’s world.

Attention as a necessary and threatened resource has been on the minds of many (if not all) of us in higher education for a long time, especially those of us who think about undergraduate education in vocational terms. For obvious reasons, that concern intensified during and after the pandemic: on this blog in 2021, Jason Stevens argued that attention may be the resource most under threat in our current moment. In the last decade, several books—by authors like Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Chris Hayes—attest to this ongoing and worsening threat. Jonathan Haidt, author of the widely read The Anxious Generation, has recently said that he increasingly sees the assault on children’s attention as on par with the mental health consequences he attributes to children’s smartphone use.

My contention is that, in order to help students develop their attentive faculties, we must not only help them see the problem clearly (which so many of them are already acutely aware of); we also need to give them active ways of reclaiming and strengthening their capacity for sustained focus. One way to do that is to name the classroom an attention gym—a space where a key goal is to develop the muscles we need to become more attentive people.

Continue reading “The Attention Gym I: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom”

Active Listening as Vocational Discernment

We live in a distracted age in which smartphones and social media threaten to interrupt us constantly, but especially college students who often struggle to maintain focus and attention. Yet attentiveness is essential for vocational exploration and discernment. This post explores how active listening can help mitigate distractions, foster meaningful conversations, and support students in their journey to figure out who they are and how they want to be in their futures.

“We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind. Don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”

Joe Jackson

Decades before smartphones and tablets, Joe Jackson’s lyrics about an upcoming date night anticipates an evening without the media distractions of that time.

Although media platforms have changed, such distractions are still plentiful and time consuming. Most college students spend more than four hours per day on their smartphones, and nearly half of teenagers say they’re online “almost constantly.” At any time, we can escape our present circumstances and explore unlimited opportunities for stimulation. No longer forced to make small talk or sit with our thoughts, we can explore colorful, scintillating messages from anywhere.

photo of people engaged on their phones
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

While these platforms can connect us, they also compete for our limited attention. Attentiveness is essential to vocational discernment, so much so that Scott Mattingly describes it as the “foundation of every vocational journey.” In Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life, Paul Wadell and Charles Pinches describe attentiveness as a virtue that helps us to be fully present. “We cannot be responsible,” they write, “without an accurate perception of reality, and we cannot accurately perceive reality without growing in attentiveness.”

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